


Before the Fall

by tehkittykat



Series: Bedtime Stories [1]
Category: Tron - All Media Types
Genre: GFY, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-24
Updated: 2012-03-24
Packaged: 2017-11-02 11:35:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/368582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehkittykat/pseuds/tehkittykat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's only temporary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Before the Fall

It’s only temporary.

Clu turned the file over and over in his hands, watching mutely as the compilers started to fidget. Jarvis’s hand was still raised to take the file from him. The _design_ from him.

It’s _temporary_. He was no fool that would code a virus of this magnitude without concurrently writing its undoing. He just.. needed space. Time. _Just one cycle_ without more of those glitch-magnets spawning from nowhere so that he could get the system in something like _order_ and without Flynn’s _glitched_ short attention-span wandering over to them _in the middle of troubleshooting_ …

Breathe. Calm down. _Smile_. Scaring the help was not going to solve anything, and he had an image to maintain.

What had he been doing?

Oh, yeah.

“How soon will production be complete? This is a sensitive operation. Estimates won’t suffice,” Clu said instead. Over and over in his hands the delicate sliver of data flipped. Life and death in his hands, a perfect copy of the Creator in this, anyway.

_It’s temporary._

He had to think of the _system_ , of the millions of lives depending on his ability to do what had to be done. Even the ISOs _themselves_ were doomed to perish if the system fault continued to propagate, and wasn’t _that_ irony?

_Just a cycle. Two or three max. Get it under control and then spread the antivirus. Say it’s just the Sea being an error as usual and Flynn won’t even_ know _, man._

Jarvis was saying words. Clu grunted something that sounded vaguely like assent.This time the task scheduler took the file from Clu’s suddenly nerveless fingers, turning to gift it to the compilers who would make it happen. No more ISOs rising out of the water. No more constant system instability. No more distractions that dragged the Creator away from _his own children_ and left them to die in the cascade of errors that was eating TRON City. Undivided attention. Just a cycle or three was all he needed.

_It’s only temporary._

So why was his code squirming uncomfortably?


End file.
